The risk of needing care in old age is a “juggernaut coming at you” under the
current system, MPs have been told, as there is no way to plan for it or
limit the damage.

Andrew Dilnot, the economist who was last year tasked with finding a new way of funding the “bust” social care regime for England, said that all anyone can do at the moment is “cross their fingers” and hope they do not end up with severe needs in retirement.

He also told the Health Select Committee that politicians rarely discuss care of the elderly, as they are embarrassed by it.

Under the current “bust” system, anyone with more than £23,250 in assets faces unlimited costs if they need to move into a care home while local authorities around the country are allowed to restrict help to those with the most critical needs. Few financial services companies offer products to insure against the risk of needing help in old age as they cannot know how much they may end up paying up.

Mr Dilnot wants ministers to implement his radical proposal for reform, under which the self-pay threshold would be raised to £100,000 and the state would step in if an individual’s costs rose above a cap of about £35,000. Insurance companies would then be more likely to enter the market.

He told MPs on Tuesday: “People don’t understand the system at the moment because it’s almost never talked about.

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“Why is it not talked about? It is complicated but frankly it’s also a mess, and as a local government politician or a central government politician if you’re responsible for it it’s unlikely you’d want to talk about it very much because it’s not something to be proud of.”

He went on: “It’s also the case that the reason it’s not talked about is that it’s a juggernaut coming at you. There’s nothing you can do at the moment except cross your fingers and hope it doesn’t happen to you.

“Because of that, there isn’t discussion because people never make choices, they feel they don’t have control.”

The Government is feared to be trying to delay reform, mainly because the Dilnot commission proposals would cost as much as £2billion to implement.

One of his fellow commissioners, the former Labour health minister Lord Warner, will on Wednesday attempt to make the main proposals law.

He will table amendments to the controversial NHS reform legislation, the Health and Social Care Bill, that would require the “establishment of a fair and sustainable partnership between individuals and the state for funding adult social care” that “caps the financial liabilities of those with excessive and unusually high lifetime care costs”.

However a spokesman for the Department of Health indicated it would not support the amendment, saying: “We recognise the urgent need to reform adult social care. The place to address this is a care and support White Paper in the spring, not the Health and Social Care Bill.

“The Commission on the Funding of Care and Support's report is a valuable contribution to the reform debate, and we have just completed a wide-ranging engagement on areas for reform to ensure that we get the priorities right.”